Category Archives: Sales

Robert De Nero and Anne Hathway starer “The Intern” has a particular scene wherein the sales analysis shows the company has been spending more marketing dollars on low value segments and practically nothing at all on high margin low volume segment. Does not this sound familiar? While companies realize Sales and marketing need to be tightly aligned, but that seldom is the case. A senior marketing director in a recent conversion blurted out that while her marketing budget has increased YoY, the ROI seems to be elusive. What was bothering her was the fact the company spends substantially in curated events managed by respected analysts, and yet sales find the coverage insufficient.

Companies spend a fortune on the conferences and events but the outcomes belie expectations. It is not surprising for many corporates to find 75% of the participants who attended their events came for free lunch or a swanky dinner. Many of the participants may not be the decision maker or influencers, but pretty junior in their organization. Corporate gifts, industry exhibitions cost a dime, and yet ineffective. Albeit companies continue to pursue many of these acts they are afraid to pause and question fundamentals. What is the objective of the event?. Why this city and this hour?, How this format will help sell their ware?. Unfortunately, many leaders want to just follow the herd. Therefore it is not surprising when studies across industry indicate:

50% of marketing budget is totally wasted

Only 34% of feel their content marketing works

25% had no marketing strategy

44% had no alignment between various marketing media

So how can companies ensure their marketing dollars are well spent and drive intended sales outcome. On the outset, it is important to realize marketing function serves three objectives. These are inform, influence and advocacy. Any marketing activity is to help consumers associate with the brand, help differentiate its offerings and seek higher revenues. Companies use various marketing assets to communicate to the interest group their unique existence, product/service offering set, pricing and other advantages. The objective is maximize reach at an affordable cost. Companies use several approaches to drive influence. Awards, citations, sponsored industry events, directed online community forums, endorsements are all effective mediums of influencing consumers. Advocacy is to enlist willing individuals who would eschew the role of brand ambassadors and drive positive word of mouth.

Different marketing assets serve different purpose and effective at different stages of sales cycle. Assets such as breakfast meeting facilitates more personalized one on one discussion that may be more effective in later stages of sales cycle. On the other hand, assets like newsletter or blog may be more useful in the early stages of sales cycle. Marketing assets also vary by their cost and impact. Some of these cost a dime and more effective to lock-in, while some may be low cost approaches to increase reach only.

Companies can realize better return on investments in their sales and marketing when these functions are congruent and well-coordinated. Congruency can be gained by ensuring same goals drive their quarterly activities, common goals entwine both functions at various levels and incentives encourage them to support each other. Coordination improves when event plans, promos, content marketing and other assets are aligned with sales motions. It is important to realize sales motions differ across segments within a company. Segments vary on the “value” of purchase and the number of customers in that particular segment. It is common to have a segment A that has few numbers of customers with a high purchase value. B and C segments are those with lower values of purchase and incumbent sizes. Each of these segments exhibit different sales behaviour. Purchasing cycles may be longer and more formal in Segment A, while the decision making could be shorter in Segment C. Sales may have to interact and influence multiple owners in enterprise segment. Order qualifying criteria may not be just enough in Segment A. Marketing must be able to push the company over to order winning plateau.

Segment A requires an enterprise sales approach where formal decision structures and vendor registration and assessments exist. Customers in this segment may be well informed about the happenings in the markets, and well-endowed to invest high ticket investment. Many customers in this segment may already been served by your competitors and would only move if there is a compelling value proposition in terms of cost, or innovation advantage. Sales function is completely managed by direct sales as relationships and continuous coverage matter to enter and grow the revenues. While inside sales functions support the direct sales with deeper profiling of people and secondary data analysis, direct sales has a key role in engagement of the segment.

Customers in segment A place a high premium on scalable and proven solutions. Prior experience and in depth expertise of the vendor play a key role in awarding the project. Marketing platforms must facilitate experience sharing and credibility reinforcing functions for direct sales to influence and close deals in this segment. Thought leadership vehicles including standards, industry frameworks and innovation ideas fly well in face to face meetings with the customers. Breakfast meetings, Industry association, standard setting bodies, and Knowledge sharing conferences serve as valuable platforms for direct sales to position the company at state of art knowledge. These platforms allow discussions to be personalized and centred on solving the problems the clients face, hence meeting service immediacy.

On the other hand, segment C, which has large number of customers with low ticket value may need a marketing and sales approach where the total transaction costs are optimised. It is practical to have inside sales as the champion to host and on board customers in segment C. Marketing functions role for this segment is to improve the reach across the market and reuse the content to improve the richness of various marketing assets. Companies can improve the reach and engagement with Segment C by adopting a consistent campaign blast policy. Mail them a newsletter, case studies and customer wins to increase awareness about your brand. Emphasize on content creation, curation and extension to reduce investments in content development. Content can be text, video and other formats. Use social media platforms to connect owners and decision makers and also to run campaigns. Figure 1 presents the alignments between Segments and Marketing assets.

Figure 1: Alignment between segments and marketing assets.

Sales efficiencies can be gained only when direct sales team are running after few accounts with a deeper insight and ownership. Also, how the inside and partner (indirect) sales team complement the direct sales matters for Segments B and C. What works best is when companies know how to mesh mash both sales and marketing functions for each segment. Have a quarter-wise marketing plan aligned to sales expectations. Content development and curation can happen in stages and stronger stories and messaging will emerge with each asset to engage and influence customer. Having a common Head of Sales and marketing or marketing aligned with sales in another structural approach that can be tried. Cross functional teams tasked with joint activities across sales and marketing will also be useful.

For many companies, sales function is an area where outcome is never closer to expectation. Companies suffer from weak funnels, missed closures, lengthier closure cycles, order losses and attrition. These are the waste that emanate in sales function. It is well known sales teams that hunt as a pack always produce better results than those that hunt individually. Unfortunately, many sales teams discourage sharing of information about networks & influence of client organizations across team members. Many a times a particular sales resource may be approaching a client organization in a certain suboptimal way without privy to alternate courses. Other colleagues may have prior experience of the account and/or situation to tide over the apprehensions. Bereft of multiple perspectives, the sales cycle would linger, and eventually the sales resource will lose interest on the account and drop it from his hunt. Incomplete sharing of information and inadequate planning for a particular opportunity is another challenge sales team face. Weak alignment, between inside sales and direct sales teams or KAM teams with others is another area that leads to sales inefficiencies. Role conflicts and tensions may also arise due to operational and personality issues. Poor policies on account transfer between direct and inside sales team, weak sales operations, and ineffective review can exacerbate drop rates. A salient issue in solution selling companies is lack of comprehensive involvement, poor alignment and ineffective role management between pre-sale and sale teams across various stages of a customer acquisition. Diffused and selective ownership without a complete coverage of customer experience management leads to lengthy customer requirement cycles, protracted customer sign off process and potential financial loss.

Companies are realizing to counter bounded rationality problems, improve commitment and camaraderie within the sales teams, they need to build coopetition teams. Teams in a coopetition collaborate to address common challenges, and address gaps and yet can remain competitive in pursuit of the individual goals. In recent years, companies like Ternary software, Zappos, David Allen Co, Precision Nutrition and others have adopted Holacracy (the system of self-governance) as an approach to build self-managing teams. Holacracy is an approach to distribute authority across the organization. In a Holacracy the organization evolves continuously adapting its structure and process through ongoing peer-to-peer governance. Common elements of organizations adopting Holacracy principles are a) constitution that defines the roles and distribution of authority related to tasks or outputs, b) roles and accountabilities, c) collaborative decision-making process enabling change in roles and authority consistent with evolution and d) meeting process that promotes co-creation and collaborative working.

Companies adopting Holacracy principles for sales organization implement following. Firstly, they create a leadership ring to build multiple owners who can eschew same corporate and sales dream and chase the horizon. However, unlike the Holacracy organizations, these rings are limited to the first level of sales, pre-sale and delivery management, the organization below each leader is still hierarchical. The leadership ring collectively evaluates opportunities, discusses approach or various sales motions (national, key accounts, acquisition, strategic account, label wins), creates proposals and pricing models, and comprehensively manages customer interaction. The group runs as a virtual organization within the company. They validate customer requirements, aligned design and delivery, and eliminate rework. Recognizing the need for flexibility to counter exigencies, leadership ring has weekly rhythm meets to discuss progress and exceptions. Any engagement model deviations, change requests, requirement changes or client leadership exits are discussed openly, opinions are considered and a comprehensive approach is arrived after considering multiple perspectives. One strategy is collectively approved individuals are given complete ownership ad freedom to pursue the actions. To support the changes in the roles and ownership of different teams over the life cycle of a customer engagement, the sales teams build a culture and process where different people wear the leadership hat. In the initial part of customer engagement, sales resources own and direct inform and influencing of customer. However, a pre-sale expert takes over the solution enumeration and client acceptance, after which the sales leader and pricing teams dons the mantle. Finally, the crown comes back to the sales resource to chase the closure. Once the order is picked, the mantle moves to delivery as the prime owner and sales as the secondary owner. Finally, what distinctly distinguishes “Holacracy” team sales reviews, is this is not the typical high octane name calling threat laced ritual. The review system moves away from status and fault finding to status and solution offering. Each review meeting is initiated with a revisit of the purpose and with a focus on actions by individuals and team can impact positive outcome.

Companies adopting Holacracy principles for sales must understand it is a cultural change and requires both management investment and patience. Sales team members must experience the trust and openness to share everyone view and the collective decision making. Parochial leaders may find the process limiting insular control of team and threatens group politics. Importantly the ability to steer the focus towards “problem solving” than “one man up” behaviour is the key to the success of the program.

Vendors may be selling to an intermediary for example an EPC or a contractor who in turn may be executing the project for an end user. While the intermediary may be more concerned with price, speed and availability, end user may focus on quality and performance. Managing diverse decision criterion requires fine balancing of relationships and strategies.

Getting the product as an industry standard or emerge as a default choice is most important part of marketing. This may require informing and influencing not just the end user, but intermediaries like EPC also. Importantly the design folks within the client organization and outside need to be influenced and won over.

B2B environment is highly competitive, in fact in some segments your former employees may be working for your competition with complete tacit information about sales strategy. Often there would be handful of customers with balance of purchasing power tilted towards them.

B2B markets also highly exposed to commoditization. Pricing pressures could be high. Product cycles may be shortened by innovations and substitutes emerge often to displace the markets.

Replacement market is a major growth opportunity. But the decision-making can be short, and unscientific. Replacements are made are 3rd party advice, availability, and price rather than quality or performance.

White labelling or contract manufacturing is yet another sales growth opportunity that brings its own challenges of cannibalization of focus.

B2B sale requires sales process to be customized to the procurement process. Unlike B2C business cold calls by themselves will not get business. According to a Forbes article, more than 50% of B2B sales resources consistently miss their targets. Many orders fail to materialize as the arc of meeting; educating, influencing and closing the order have been missed.

How can one ensure their B2B sale is firing? Right structural alignment, adherence to process to capture the activity at each sales stage, and appropriate incentive systems help a company realize right sales outcomes is what I actually needed to make B2B sales happen.

Get the right rhythm of activities between arc of initial meeting, mapping of key decision makers, product education and influence, defining right commercial terms and closure. End users need to have a solid reason to place an order, may need to follow up documentation and hierarchy before the decision is made. Customer segmentation, need analysis, profitability and associated risks must be weighed much before you respond to an RFP. If the end user happens to be government or large organization additional challenges of bank guarantees, penalties and receivables must be evaluated in detail.

With increased adoption of mobility and availability IT tools, companies can use appropriate structural arrangements to minimize the cost of sales and yet improve reach and conversion. Sales structures must include not just direct sales teams, but inside, partner and product teams that complement the direct sales. Create a dynamic sales organization that not only covers the markets, but builds partners and ambassadors for it. A dynamic sales organization must include:

Regional Manager – Business Leader for the region, Price and Margin manager

General Manager – P&L leader, management representative, maximum interest with company and across company, Revenue Leader

With new technologies B2B companies must realize sales resources are not the only one to open door and neither opportunities nor marketing is the exclusive promoter. With many B2B buyers self-educating using tools like social media, vendors need to effectively empower and promote product and application engineering teams to network and influence the ecosystem, right from design companies, EPC contractors, Standard setting bodies and user community. Role of product management that helps in inform and educate, influence the design and procurement teams by its expertise and bring alignment between requirement and solution is often under invested. Product managers are key to requirement gathering but also define the specs of an RFP. Promote product management –client and design interactions at all levels.

Invest in sales operations. Sales operation has different meaning for every company. In some, sales operation does number collation and crunches data. In some they are responsible for system, programs and process. In some they are responsible for pricing and participate in large complex deals. Fundamentally, the role of sales operations is to capture the data related to sales activities, and help sales team to make decisions based on data rather than subjective assessment. Sales operations more than just being a data sink, helps integration benefits to the organization by linking various activities.

Make available non-sales oriented platforms and information content to inform, educate and advocacy of their expertise and products. More educational content from a B2B vendor helps in build trust and respect for its expertise. Share original content on social media platforms and optimize for search. Companies that go beyond their product range and address the complete industry are seen as leaders and more such content augments the credibility of the company’s brand.

A major change B2B vendors need to make to their sales strategy is to consciously move away from the decades old sales playbooks they treat as mantras. B2B vendors who just moved their sales process to modern technologies without fundamental changes in the sales engagement find the results are always below expectations. With the new technologies and information intensive markets, B2B vendors may have to rework their sales playbooks but also rethink how they are enabling the sales person to decipher and deepen the customer’s knowledge. While adopting the new technologies ensure the playbooks allow sales resources to adjust their individual strategies and styles to add value to the sales engagement process.

Key account management (KAM) is an important element of sales strategy. Key account is a business-to-business customer of strategic importance. In turbulent times, key accounts provide assured revenues and growth. While many companies limit contribution from Key accounts to reduce the business risk, healthy 20-25% revenues from KAM is a great strategy with unpredictable markets. Despite its strategic importance many sales heads and the companies do not apply sufficient resources and investments into KAM engine. KAM engine does not deliver if,

Face to face meetings do not happen in a continuous manner

Low “farming” efforts within the client organization

Sales person attitude and limited skills

Inability to identify opportunities quickly and raise bar for competition

Poor negotiation skills

For KAM to work, both the organizations must achieve value, have sufficient trust in each other interests and capabilities, has sufficient flexibility to accommodate beyond-transactional activities, excellent communications and emphasis on long term professional relationships. In our experience of working with several organizations, we find successful KAM requires good fitment between the sales person profile, processes and measures. Sales profiles that are good at building strong advocates in customer organization or generous in giving time to help others and easily get along with everyone works best as a KAM with business of multiple revenue streams. In industries like IT, and financial services such sales profiles work best. In capital goods industries a combinations of above skills and a loner, who follows own instincts and is self-assured works best.

To make KAM successful, the company must

Clearly articulates the short term, medium term and long term goal

Invest in the right resources to deliver results

Make efforts to shift the focus from customer-centric to business complexities and account dynamics

A senior marketing director in a recent conversion blurted out that while her marketing budget has increased YoY, the ROI seems to be elusive. What was bothering her was the fact the company spends substantially in curated events managed by respected analysts, and yet Sales find the coverage insufficient. Look familiar. This is a common problems with most companies where marketing focus on few vehicles. Some believe in only the physical networking events and other lean heavily on social media platforms. Here again companies do not follow an “embellish” strategy. Consider the broad marketing asset a company has its disposal. On the social media front, the assets range from infographics, blogs, extended blogs, videos, case studies, white papers, publications and community platforms. On the physical front, a company could use industry events, workshops, analyst meets, association forums, and breakfast meetings. What works best is when companies know how to mesh mash both physical and online assets and the assets within each category. One strategy that could be effectively followed is to have a quarter-wise marketing plan aligned to sales expectations. Then follow up a “embellish” strategy where in the messaging starts from basic assets and progresses to high scale assets. The advantage of this is that content development and curation can happen in stages and stronger stories and messaging emerge with each insert. For example, an infographic can be used to reward the reader with rich insights with high level cause-effect. Marketing team adopts a Tufte approach that may be high on information density and distilled functionality, focus on connectedness, and communicate through high imagery. Next level, a blog, which is used to influence, informative or thought provoking, may extend the infographic content using Kafka model. The blog could contain rich arguments and silver line conclusion. Whitepaper an extensive write up of blog may be used as a teaser before all material are tested, or position credibility and promote advocacy. Beauty of the embellish model is the content not only unfolds in a consistent manner, content is richer and all of them form independent hooks to improve visibility. Similar extensive strategy can also be used for physical platforms. Companies realize focus group meetings, followed by industry forum and curated events including analyst shows provide improve coverage and affinity. Moral of the story?. When planning for marketing, consider the complete assets at your disposal and build a embellish strategy that improves reach and richness of marketing communication complementing sales.

Business Transformation is the radical and holistic change companies undergo to grow the business faster, make them more relevant to the market, and de risk them from any technology or environmental change. Like any change companies can either pursue a big bang approach or a state-wise approach. In this blog, we share our experience of companies that have successfully embarked and achieved business transformation using an incremental approach.

Like the Chinese proverb, a long journey starts with small steps, successful business transformation starts with small but measured initial steps. The first question when companies attempt transformation is which process to touch. In most businesses, the easiest function that is amenable change and one without too much dependencies and investments is “sales”. Moreover, any minor changes in sales function has a direct impact on the “outcome”, be it new customer acquisition, or more orders from existing customers. Either ways the outcomes impact the overall mood and functioning of the company. Sales outcomes are also highly visible, all across the organization people can see the flurry of activities that start once a new client is gained. Any win, however small, can uplift the mood for change and thaw the resistance to change. Employees should not feel threatened by it; instead they must be allowed to participate in this change – especially the critical members of the team who are key influencers. It must vibe with a sense of growth and pride in the organization. What such changes do is to convince fence-sitters that change is good and doable. A highly visible short term win will also enable the top leadership of the firm to start change on a winning note.

Once this clarity of purpose is communicated through changes in sales, it becomes necessary to get the second level. It is best at this stage to use existing resources within the firm and enable them to drive change on two areas eliminate waste and improve visibility. Create groups to improve the operations, ask them to identify and drive changes where they feel empowered. Next involve people in information, communication and advocacy changes. Ask the employees to suggest changes to website, the sales and marketing collaterals that work best and ask them to drive these improvements. Their buy-in is absolutely essential to drive the second-order change. Now that we have a broad based team that believes in the new vision, we need to build a sense of urgency so that the change that has been demonstrated can be capitalized upon. Once this happens, creative inputs on products, offering and markets start to pour in. It also gives everyone a chance to delve deeper into the core offering to examine possible extensions. This helps build the roadmap for the company as to which markets and products they need to be in. Once we have the top and second level of leadership involved in this exercise, they believe in the new vision and positioning, especially since it is their aspiration that has been translated into the firm’s vision and strategy.

Once there is trust, comfort and belief in the vision and need for change, it becomes easier to begin small structural changes within the organization. The structure needs to align the capabilities within the organization to the new goals and strategies. Given today’s environment, no team or division can work in silos. Hence it becomes imperative that we put in place review mechanisms that will facilitate cross functional work. Implementing measures and balanced scorecards that help break silos should be thoughtfully designed and implemented. Training and reviewing team members to drive this, building their capabilities and motivating them becomes essential. Working as teams and leveraging off each other needs to become a habit, a new way of working. Once success can be shown in a couple of inter-functional initiatives, a broad base of employees becomes adept at adopting such structures across the entire organization. Making change happen in other functions and departments new becomes a lot easier. Hence managing transformation in stages with the right vision, by building the right capabilities, help build the foundation for a large business transformation.

After-sales service is often seen as necessary devil and not many organizations think about the impact it has on revenues and customer satisfaction. This is despite the fact that dealers and OEM’s margins on the virgin equipment may be less than 2-3% of the final price, while parts revenues can hover around 25++ margins.

The biggest cause for lack of proper after-sales service is that many organizations have no proper service strategy aligned with their organizational goals. Many adopt the concept of “Outsourcing of parts logistics” without realizing the zone of conflicts it can create and the impact. The idea to make cost efficient parts supply and distribution is appreciated, but this doesn’t synchronize with the field customer service. Worst part, is that various divisions work at loggerheads within the organization, causing a lack of cohesion between the field service and parts supply. The parts and service aspect of an automotive organization go hand-in-hand.

More than 60% of parts per vehicle, on an average, are out-sourced by the OEMs from individual parts supplier. In order to avoid risk, OEMs develop 4-5 vendors per part when 2-3 vendors are more than sufficient. This policy of the OEM forces these suppliers to supply in the open market to increase revenues. Moreover, Parts supply and parts sales in open market are more profitable than sales through the respective OEMs. This inevitably leads to revenue loss from services for the OEM.

Product development regulations are pretty high in developed nations, leading to high quality. Hence, minimum levels of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for service are adequate to ensure there is no cause for complaint from consumers. When the same SOPs are implemented in the Indian market, it leads to service failure due to the lower quality of components. When the foreign culture of highly reliable and innovative product doesn’t exist in the cost conscious Indian automotive industry, then why does the after-sales service strategy and policy remain the same for both the markets?

With a specialized mechanic in every corner of the street providing service at cheaper rates and the availability of cheaper spare parts in grey market, the dealership revenues are in doldrums. The automation and IT infra-structure connecting the OEM and dealerships is not robust and not fool-proof. Moreover, the revenue generating model for the dealerships is not very sustainable in the long-run especially during economically low periods, considering the huge infrastructure investment made by each dealership of an OEM. All these factors induce the dealer to purchase from grey market and eventually, a loss for the OEM occurs.

The Indian Automotive Industry is moving towards technology saturation. There is no substantial product variation, especially in terms of technology. Brand differentiation can only be improved through an effective and efficient after-sales service channel. Issues such as development and implementation of a sustainable after-sales strategy, with focus on number of parts suppliers, India centric SOPs for service, and not outsourcing the parts logistics, are just tip of the iceberg issues that need to be grappled with. There needs to be a well thought out and integrated service strategy specific to local markets, since it is a substantial revenue stream that will improve bottom line and help companies tide out the troughs in sales!!!

What do ALS ice bucket challenge, P&D Tampax, Unilever “Dove campaign for real beauty” Volkswagen: The Fun theory, Old Spice man aftershave or KLM surprise have in common. They are all good examples of how to plan and execute a successful viral marketing. Many believe viral marketing needs to have a whacky idea to attract interest/create suspense, and conversations amongst users and brand. Successful viral marketing campaigns go beyond these. Some common elements of good viral campaigns include: 1) surprise/interest element, 2) scalable idea unlimited by culture and religious restrictions, 3) persuasion by influencers, 4) exploit common motivations, and 5) market the marketing.

Surprise element is undoubtedly very important in viral marketing campaigns. The exhilarating moment packs the required spice of experience for individuals to stay connected with the campaigns. But the potential for disaster also lies within it. Toyota’s “the other you” game for advertising Matrix is a classic example. The rules of the game went like this; a person would sign up for his unwitting friend and then that friend would get stalked by strangers. The game not only scared the hell out of people, but also annoyed them. People felt that their privacy was infringed. Toyota focused too much on the surprise element while ignoring a very important factor – the emotions surprise is going to evoke. If the surprise doesn’t bring any pleasant emotions then the whole campaign goes for a toss.

ALS ice bucket or Volkswagen’s Fun theory campaigns like many other successful ones are scalable ideas that take an everyday activity and make it fun to positively affect people behavior. Volkswagen involved its targets/customer to series of experiments to find how these could make people healthier, environmentally conscious and safer, all the while creating a parallel experience with brand elements and the campaigns. Same goes for ALS which used a mundane daily activity of bathing into a ritual to raise awareness about ALS and seek donations through crowdsourcing. Co-creation where the company encourages users to become actively involved in the brand or product is a key component of viral marketing. This helps companies to stop selling to them, but instead market with them.

Persuasion by influencers, whether active or passive, is an important element of spread of viral marketing. Insights from social network theory reveal that “network central” influencers (one with many connections) are most effective to communicate the campaigns and if there is an element of persuasion, like invitation or challenge, people networked with influencers are baited to participate. ALS influencer invites are a case in point.

Social stigma’s of refusing a challenge or the need to be seen in the company of Page 3 is a “primal” drive which most successful campaigns cleverly exploit. The common motivations of Homo sapiens to be seen as the social animal, higher up in hierarchy helps people to donate and participate in events.

KLM using a similar surprise-and-delight strategy as Toyota identified irate passengers waiting for their flights ad presented them with thoughtful presents. The clincher in the campaign was actually the act being completely filmed live by a camera crew and that led to positive human emotional drama. This helped KLM use an effective marketing to connect and appeal to customers, but also market their marketing effectively.

Now onto some marketing campaigns that brought more bricks and bats than bouquets. The mistake of putting popularity above purpose is another factor. AT&T’s tweet had to face the consequences of doing it. AT&T uploaded a picture of a smart phone clicking 2 streaks of light at ground zero as a tribute to 9/11. The tweet had to be withdrawn immediately as it was considered offensive by a lot of people. Here the purpose was to pay the tribute but instead they tried to capitalize off of the emotions surrounding 9/11 for profit. A separate ad only for smart phone without linking it to 9/11 would have served the purpose. Well, they did get the popularity but only to tarnish their own image.

The marketers also seem to be overlooking the kind of conversations which are going to surround the campaign. Hyundai’s pathetic attempt to make suicide look funny created a lot of negative conversations. Some of the audiences could relate it to suicides of their closed ones and were tormented by the ad. It evoked bad memories and people went around talking about it which gave it a multiplier effect.

The 21st century audience is unforgiving as social media has emboldened them. Plan well to pursue viral marketing campaigns, ensure all elements are well packaged. With a small dosage of common sense and focus on objective, this aim is not unachievable.

From shy to outspoken, gloomy to vibrant, precocious to spontaneous, personality change is not only adopted by humans, brands also morph to a new environment. Be it Peroni’s success story in UK, Skoda Fabia’s repositioning in UK or Netflix in USA, companies have successfully pursued a strategy of premium positioning to command better margins and higher image from home markets. How do companies exploit this strategy?.

For Skoda, originally a Czech company and later acquired by Volkswagen what really worked was their promotional mix of TV and print campaign backed by direct mailings to the existing Skoda customers in UK. By imbibing the Volkswagen model, they were able to change the customer’s perception about Skoda from a “cheap” car to “value for money” car. Skoda’s desperation for rebranding was so extreme that they went as far as using “The Fabia is a car so good that you won’t believe it’s a Skoda”slogan in their ad campaign.Well, the desperation finally paid off because the campaign increased sales of Fabia as well as another model named Octavia by 29% when compared to previous year.

Peroni’s story is little different than that of Skoda’s. Peroni’s aid of “Golden Italian Days” in UK was the real spark behind the success. It gave the UK customers a feel of Italy by depicting the images of Italy of sixties. By invoking nostalgic feelings, Peroni was able to charge premium price for its beer.Netflix, has used “Playful Kiss” drama to attract viewers globally. Burberry of London, for Spanish markets created a premium positioning by adopting a strong classic element and improved fabric and other materials.

The strategy works when the customers are richer, but not well informed. Cultures which associate higher value to tradition, and heritage are the market where the strategy works more effectively, especially for hedonic products. Markets with colonial connections work best for some home brands and can actually lead to international success. British Dyson Vacuum cleaner exploited its British inventor origin and Britain connection to make an entry into Malaysian market and successfully compete with Electrolux and other brands. A grand old strategy perfected by many economy brands like Vichy, Thalion, Lancome in most part of Africa and Asian markets.

The strategy also works when there is a culture wave. Take for example, Korean beauty brands which have discovered great internationalization opportunity in the wake of Gangnam Style shakes and hallyu. Korean companies with French sounding names like Mamonde, Laxara, Laneige have found a niche in China’s market by targeting people who like Korean Soap Opera or younger hipsters who croon to K-pop numbers. What is common for all these brands is they have successfully used a local positioning global brand strategy, there by their marketing communication can reflect the local hues and required flavor.

Many a times, the sales of a firm starts off from the founder’s personal contacts and then expands into newer territories. As firms grow and expand, there is need to diversify and derisk customer base, both in terms of revenue from a particular segment and percentage of contribution from a the top few customers. However, most companies find this desired state alluding, for many reasons. Sales structure, team reporting, carving of markets and sales measurements are the major roadblocks that hold back the company’s sales achievement. Many firms do not get the required ROI despite hiring more direct sales people, training them, and arming them with heavy technology & gadgets.

How do you get your sales engine firing and delivering the expected results? Start with the basics of your sales strategy, what is the product or service, what would be the best channel to sell, is push or pull the right approach, commercial policies etc. Once your sales strategy is clear, evaluate the structure to see whether it is aligned to deliver the results. Do not just follow the herd by putting more direct costly sales resources, often a good combination of low cost backend and high touch direct sales force is not only useful but cost effective. Identify systems that cane be deployed without much hoopla!. You do not need Bazooka’s to kill a fly. Do not buy overkill sales systems if you can keep your process simple and stupid. Importantly, your systems must be able to allocate activities to resources, make them own and drive outcomes. Systems that require less monitoring and less control always work best. Keep away the burecarutic multi-report systems, they are just too much of file pushing, but no juice at the end of tunnel.

The size and structure of the sales team is also important. The right account and territory assignments, the type of sales resources that you have, their effectiveness, the number of each type of resource, coverage of territory are issues to be kept in mind here. Most companies make a cardinal mistake of allocating geographic regions interspersed with named accounts. This is a classical “falling between two stools” folly that one must avoid. Follow a simple principle – either geographic or account wise dedication, and stick to it for some time. Intelligent sales managers often rotate sales resources between the geographies to break the monotony and avoid the “familiarity breeds contempt” effect.

Most crucial, but often got wrong, is the issue of talent. Account mining is different from opening, hence characteristics of KAM is different from hunter. Having the right mix of hunters and harvesters is key to effective sales management. Recruitment and selection of the right candidates, putting in place appropriate development and training plans for their sustained success is also a key component. There also has to be clarity on the sales culture that one needs to build and strengthen. If you want to create a group of interdependent collaborative sales teams, ensure the mining and acquisitions teams appreciate this aspect and are culturally attuned to this joint outcomes. Do not fall into the trap of aligning culture using incentives, it seldom works, especially in sales. When high standards, clarity, transparency, teamwork and commitment are part of the culture and are followed diligently and imbibed in our systems, success is closer then imagined.

Finally sales can be only effective if it is fortified as a continuous and learning system. Systems to gather competitive intelligence, sales support, performance management, rewards & recognition and IT systems such as CRM, KM, BI etc., are all typical support systems that need to be aligned. Hence, building a high performance sales organization is not just about hiring more sales people, or using technology. It is about putting in place all the inter-dependant components in the system that will fire in unison. While the above list is by no means exhaustive, they are just some of the inter-dependencies that need to be built and aligned to have a reliable, consistent and effective sales organization.